With extensions in Scratch 3.0, and more to come from the Scratch Team and advanced community, ScratchX will become an equivalent to Snap!. It was useful for a time, giving extra features, but more complexity. Then, the Scratch Team added most of those features, with more online compatibility on their website (being able to run projects in browsers), and while there's still an active Snap! community, with workarounds and better performance on Scratch 2, it's nothing like what it once was. ScratchX became more widely used, for developers, rather than users. But with a clear, more official, better solution, it will become similar to Snap!. It will allow for more customisability, but in a few years, your users will be much more reluctant when this Scratch is unfamiliar, and requires them to enable Flash player. Anything you say otherwise is redundant. Ultimately, people go for the most convenient solution, and Scratch 3 will be that.

Scratch is used by a wide variety of people for a wide variety of purposes

I think it will take much longer than is currently estimated, before users are allowed to submit extensions, that the whole Scratch3 community will be allowed to use.

The Scratch team have been very reluctant to allow this to happen in the past and that's why we have ScratchX as a compromise offering.

I can easily envisage that a Scratch3X site will be created and that user extensions will not be allowed on the main Scratch3 site

Snap! is its own environment intended, primarily, as a tool for degree level computer science teaching and a showcase to show that block-programming need not be restricted to simple constructs

Ultimately, people go for the most convenient solution, and Scratch 3 will be that.

I look forward to using Scratch 3 but I'm still planning on teaching Scratch in schools this school year using Scratch1.4 as its very reliable to use in schools whereas online resources such as Scratch2/3 are sometimes not available when required

SimpleScratch wrote:

*Snip!*
I look forward to using Scratch 3 but I'm still planning on teaching Scratch in schools this school year using Scratch 1.4 as its very reliable to use in schools whereas online resources such as Scratch 2/3 are sometimes not available when required.

But you can download Scratch 2 onto a computer, so that the offline versions can be available..? Is it because of the increasing difficulty of downloading Flash?

And the number of Snap! users and activity has been dwindling, but it still exists and is active, as you'll find on the forums page. But the Scratch3X idea wouldn't be needed, because it says on the be Scratch 3.0 FAQ that:

'Scratch 3.0 includes a new extensions system that the Scratch Team has designed to enable developers to connect the Scratch programming editor to a wide range of devices and services.'

SimpleScratch wrote:

I think it will take much longer than is currently estimated, before users are allowed to submit extensions, that the whole Scratch3 community will be allowed to use.

They _have_ been delaying Scratch 3.0's release, but it has been progressing and will almost certainly release in January, 2019.

But you can download Scratch 2 onto a computer, so that the offline versions can be available..? Is it because of the increasing difficulty of downloading Flash?

Not a flash issue - the prob with the off line version is that it (used to anyway) almost certainly want to update either itself or the offline flash player when you launched it.

So it takes too much time up at the start of a lesson

it may not do it anymore, but I stopped trying out over a year ago